LIFE – Let It Flow Easy!!
My teacher always used to say that Fear, Attachment and Insecurity are the three Musketeers who always walk together. And once one surfaces, you can expect the other two to definitely make their presence felt. The suffering in one’s life is attributable to these three Musketeers.
FEAR – False Evidence Appearing Real. This happens when our mind travels into any unpleasant past experience or future imagining outcomes or possibilities that aren’t real in the present moment. When we go deeper into our thoughts, we figure out that Fear is the child of thought. They say a Fearful mind is a devils workshop. My teacher always used to say this ” Fear goes where fear grows. So if you feed fear, the more it grows.”
INSECURITY – Often stems out of fear. Insecurity reflects doubt, its a reflection of how our focus is on what is missing, what is lacking, what is not right according to our expectations or desires. Notice how every time fear knocks on our door, insecurity creeps in.
ATTACHMENT – These are of three kinds of attachments – Mental, Emotional and Physical.
– Mental attachment is to our thoughts, ideas, belief systems. Notice how strongly we tend to defend our ideas or belief systems, when others question it, notice how hard it is to let go of those belief systems even when they do not serve us or bring us suffering. Any form of aversion is also a form of mental attachment. My teacher always said, mental attachment is the most difficult form of attachment – one which is the extremely difficult to identify and then the most challenging to let go of.
– Emotional attachments are attachments to our emotions, or relationships. Notice how hard it is to let go of the feeling of hurt or betrayal or any kind of emotional trauma, how difficult is to forgive. Often we would carry the hurt caused by someone’s words in our childhood, right through our adulthood and continue to live the rest of our lives just because we struggle letting go of the hurt. We even take pride, try to gain sympathy from others by repeating our hurt over and over. In fact we even hide behind the emotional hurt to justify our current state of being. “This is who I am” – is the shield we choose to wear because it is hard to let go.
– Physical attachments are the attachments to all material things including our physicality. We notice this more in today’s world since the focus is primarily on the physical appearance, the color of our skin, the features, the body shape. Then to our wealth, our possessions and belongings. We rarely like to share. We can see this in the way we continue to treat our planet, hoard, we know that its a race to the bottom. Notice how we perceive physical deformities or mental deformities, how we perceive death – A Big failure.
If these three Musketeers bring so much of suffering, then there has to be some antidote which can help us alleviate from this. Masters have often talked about “Detachment” as the antidote. But its often hard to understand what detachment really means, for we tend to confuse it with indifference, denial, disconnection, disengagement, or becoming disinterested or dispassionate.
Real detachment cannot happen without compassion. The detachment that Masters talk about means being fully engaged- being fully engaged with life, being passionate about life and all its experiences BUT without having the desire to control the outcome. It truly means letting go of the expectation that things will happen or people would behave or react or respond according to our expectations. It requires breaking away from Fear, insecurity and attachments.
As I continue to experience my life, every single interaction that I have with others, and how I respond, whether with compassion or with anger, frustration is a mere reflection of where I am when it comes to practicing “compassionate detachment”. For me in particular, people who can really press my buttons and test me on my level of patience and compassion, are my immediate family members. And every single time, I get sucked into their drama, my awareness forces me to remind myself to choose the path of “compassionate detachment”. Particularly for those, who are on the journey of self awareness, it is a conundrum, how do you really respond to those tricky situations with close family members, when cutting ties is really not the best option.
Few years back when anybody and everybody could trigger negative emotions in me, I was sitting before my teacher complaining and moaning about how painful my life was. As I continued to spill out the various causes of my unhappiness, he took out his handkerchief from the pocket and with force and anger threw it at the wall. I was taken aback and this was something I had never experienced of him. I became anxious and was wondering if I did anything to cause the anger in him. He looked at me with softness and love in his eyes, and asked me “what do you think? what happened there?” By then I had spent enough time with my teacher to know this was his was his version of Zen Koan and I knew by the end of our session something inside of me would shift.
The handkerchief after hitting the wall, fell straight onto the floor. He asked me, “why do you think the handkerchief did not stick to the wall but instead fell flat?” I replied thinking the obvious – the wall is smooth, there is nothing on the wall to which the handkerchief would have got hooked into. Pleased with my reply, he asked me with a smile – “then how come what others say or do, sticks to your inner wall?” I paused and reflected…. The walls of my heart had all sorts of hooks to which whatever others threw, would stick. My inner walls were not smooth enough because I was living with the three Musketeers most of the time. I knew the only way I could move forward was by working towards making my inner walls smooth. And the only way I could do that was by practicing Compassionate Detachment.
….to be cont’d